A leader of the Conservative movement in the United States, Rabbi Jerome Epstein, speaks out against Shas activists in Israel who burned copies of the Christian bible — and the relative silence from Jewish quarters.

Published: 05/23/2008

NEW YORK (JTA) — Yom Ha’atzmaut — Israel’s Independence Day — has come and gone. Together, Jews in North America and Israel joyously celebrated Israel’s 60 years of achievement and success. What Israel has accomplished in its short lifetime is a source of pride to all of us.

For six decades, Israel has distinguished itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a corner of the world where those values often are desecrated. It has been a haven of religious freedom and tolerance. It is worthy of note that in the Jewish state, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists are guaranteed by law the freedom to practice their religion openly. I am deeply proud of Israel.

But my feelings of pride are dampened by the distasteful behavior of Shas activists in Israel who burned copies of the Christian bible, which they allege had been distributed by Christian missionaries. I certainly do not endorse missionizing activities in Israel, but the images of book-burning Jews makes me shudder. It is immoral for any Jew to act this way. For a religious Jew to do so is a Chilul HaShem — a desecration of God’s name. Those Jews who burn books make a sham out of their personal piety.

I shudder at the irony of religious and committed Jews burning any books, whatever their content. Even if they do not remember the Holocaust, I do.

When German Nazi soldiers and civilians burned books in 1933, that action was widely condemned, especially by Jews. That act pained us to the core. For us, the People of the Book, the mere idea of burning a book is destructive and the act itself inflicts an indelible wound.

I shudder at the irony of Jews burning religious books. Whether the text is holy to Jews is irrelevant. The texts that were burned are holy to Christians. Imagine how any Jew would feel if non-Jews burned our sacred texts because they disagreed with them. It does not matter whether they regarded those texts as holy. We Jews, whose ancestors have lived through the inquisitions, whose very essence was desecrated when Christians burned our treasured Talmud in European cities in the Middle Ages, know the tears that are shed when something holy to us is desecrated.

I shudder at the irony of book burning in Israel. Israel is more than a homeland for Jews. It is a light unto the nations. Israel must not permit revered rabbis who condone sin — much less those who encourage it — to go unchallenged. Israel must not permit misguided reactionaries to go unpunished, even if those misguided reactionaries, ironically enough, are the revered rabbis. Book burning in Israel is an attack on all that Israel stands for.

I shudder at the irony of silence. We know what happens when good people remain silent and evil edges out good. Israel and Jews throughout the world must condemn this atrocious behavior and take the bold and necessary steps to ensure that this one-time occurrence remain a singular nightmare.

(Rabbi Jerome Epstein is the executive vice president of United Synagogues of Conservative Judaism.)

Have you been to Berlin? On the Unter den Linden, there’s a book-burning memorial in the university plaza where the first Nazi-sponsored book burning took place. You look down through a window in the ground, and inside there’s a small room filled with empty bookshelves. It’s haunting.

Reb Deb replies:

No, I haven’t. But it sounds haunting. Windows into closed spaces are arresting to begin with, where a wall has been taken away to permit to you see the inside of something, or the preserved remains of something. I am imagining what this looks like. I wonder if there’s a photo on-line somewhere.

Y’know, that’s exactly the Jewish thing to do. Our tradition teaches that we treat books like we treat human beings: with reverence. This means that once they are no longer useable, we bury them, not burn them. Perhaps our abhorrence of burning bodies began in the ancient world, where fire was the appropriate means of delivering one’s offering to one’s god or gods. We specifically banned human beings as offerings; burning bodies, even after death, is reminiscent of that. Perhaps from here stems Judaism’s abhorrence of cremation. Which would also help explain why so many contemporary Jews view cremation as acceptable. You have to really be tuned into the ancient culture and stories for them to have an impact of our sensibilities, and most of us aren’t tuned like that.

Of course, after the Holocaust, when Jewish books and bodies both went up in smoke, there is a renewed reason for Jews not to burn our bodies. But I find that this argument, too, has little resonance today with many Jews. I don’t understand why. If genocidal Jew-haters used burning our bodies as a means toward the “Final Solution” (to the “Jewish problem” — meaning, the elimination of all Jews from the face of the planet), that right there is reason enough for us to reject it once again.

But both of these are a little off your topic. Mulch/compost is part of what happens after burial. So yes, bury them and grow grapes!

But of course that would be according the words in the books some respect, and I’ll bet that’s exactly what these people were trying not to do.

i’m trying to think if i’ve ever been inspired to set something on fire. have i ever felt so AGGRESSIVE against something that i wanted to tear something apart with a billionbillion angry free radicals into dust and vapor in a mere few minutes of violence?

i guess not.

do you think there was an element of sacrifice? offering to god? doing god’s will in a sacred orgy of violence?

what’s up Homo sapiens’ ass, that we get so violent? I wonder what other creatures are into it? Maybe ants. E. O. Wilson said that if ants had the nuclear bomb the earth would be gone in a smidgen. I don’t recall his justification for that. will have to go and reread it.

“If I am for not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only then what am I? And if not now, when?”

Perhaps this whole book burning incenses me so because our Nation was born with the principle of Freedom of Religion (including the right to not believe). Perhaps because it is because our people’s belief is that we are given the freedom of choice and without that choice we lose that which makes us Jews.

What disturbs me most is how we would have reacted had our Torah been desecrated. I am outraged by Shas! For the unthinking acts of my brethren I apologize and ask for forgiveness from the Christian Community. I’ll remember this outrage during Yom Kippur’s Al Cheit.

I found this looking for book destroying information, specifically Jewish destruction of Jewish texts.

This has happened frequently throughout history. For example Ben Sirah, Maccabees, and other religious texts seem to have been destroyed probably by the Pharisees. More recently invaluable literature abuot Shabbatai Zevi.

A Chabad rabbi told me when he was approached by Jews for Jesus he would gladly take all the books they gave him so that he could destroy them.

I guess the hand wringing here is over burning Jewish books by gentiles… ok… wah

You’re right. Jews have also censored. But I think you missed the point of the whole article — that this is hand-wringing over the burning of GENTILE books. Which you would think would be even less important to a Jew. But it is important, that’s why Rabbi Epstein wrote the article.

And his point is centered around burning, not “just” suppression. The act of burning is, from a Jewish point of view, impious and disrespectful. I know that that’s not true for all cultures, but it is ingrained in ours. We used to burn offerings, but never books or people.

I’m not sure that you’re correct when you say that the Pharisees (= the early rabbis) destroyed Ben Sira and Maccabees, etc — in fact if I remember correctly rabbis of the Talmud quoted and discussed Ben Sira, so obviously they were reading him. They certainly didn’t include all the possible Jewish books of the day in the Jewish Bible. There were competing sects, and the rabbis left a lot out, for instance many of the books found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were irrelevant or antithetical to some of their teachings. You’d no more expect the Democratic Senators to include all the speeches of Republican Senators in a “best of the Senate” volume they were compiling! Or the University of Michigan football team to publish the Ohio State fight song in their game program. Actually, the Senate example is a better one, because the rabbis left out things that they accepted and studied but that they just didn’t think met the test of “holy.” As far as Maccabees and possibly even Ben Sira went, they simply weren’t ancient enough to make the grade.

There are historical reasons why mainstream (non-mystical) Judaism was quite leery of anything having to do with Shabtai Tzvi (Sabbatai Zevi) after his death in 1676. I don’t know what book destruction you’re referring to, or when it took place, but I’ve no doubt that again, things were suppressed. Possibly even destroyed.

But I’ll be you they weren’t burned.

Bottom line: the fact that Rabbi Epstein didn’t mention that the ancient rabbis were editors, nor did he mention that Jewish books considered heretical have been suppressed by mainstream Judaism, nor the fact that a rabbi of your acquaintance is willing to destroy books (you didn’t mention just what those books are — Jewish books? Christian book? Jews for Jesus books?) doesn’t mean that he was ignoring this part of Jewish history. It doesn’t meant that he was saying Jews are perfect, or even consistent, on the point of respecting the written word. His point is, we don’t burn books. I notice that the rabbi you know who said he would “destroy” books didn’t even say “burn.”